Race in the Early 50s Military
Race doesn’t enter into OTD! except for two cartoons that are a bit troublesome, but knowing my dad they were more about sight gags than denigrating people of other races. Then again, the absence of race (and of non-whites in general) in his cartoons speaks volumes about the 1950s military, and it’s difficult to understand without some context of military history.
In 1947, Southern Senators threatened a filibuster when President Harry S. Truman created a President’s Commission on Civil Rights, which recommended anti-lynching laws and the elimination of poll taxes. In response, in 1948, the same election year when he was fighting for his political life, a gutsy President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 to abolish segregation in the military and to order a full integration of all the services. A record of the order from the U.S. National Archives, reproduced here, states that there was “considerable resistance to the executive order from the military, but by the end of the Korean conflict almost all the military was integrated.”
The U.S. Air Force was the first branch of the military to be desegregated, and my dad was in an early integrated barracks.
At Erding AFB my father was housed with three other men, one of whom was African-American from the south. My dad doesn’t remember much about the other two men, except that one had an Italian last name. The black man’s first name was Lincoln. I’d like to avoid using his last name, but I can tell you that it started, ironically, with “Phil” (though not Phillip or Phillips). I could imagine my dad, a friendly but sometimes shy guy, being a bit amused that his own first name was part of Lincoln’s last name, plus my dad was born and raised in the Land of Lincoln. Lincoln and Phil didn’t become friends, regretfully, and my dad doesn’t even remember what Lincoln did at Erding, but it’s a pleasant thought that my father was an early participant in the new world that Truman envisioned.
As for these sight gags, I’ll let you be the judge. I try to reconcile the way the world views race now with the way it did then, and with the man I know to be my father.
Seriously, don’t you find this “Geronimo” cartoon a little funny?
I don’t believe it is denigrating Native Americans as much as making fun of the fact that airmen yelled “Geronimo!” when they jumped out of planes.
Nowadays we change the names of sports teams because they offend Native Americans and their supporters. In my home state, the University of Illinois retired Chief Illiniwek years ago after outcry from the community. I support these changes, as we can never do enough to reverse the damage we have done to indigenous populations, and this is a very small step we can take in the scheme of things.
Geronimo himself surely wouldn’t have understood this cartoon without explaining a plane to him, but I like to think he would be proud that his name was associated with the bravery of people jumping out of an airplane. He probably would have been concerned for their safety—he was a Medicine Man.
This cartoon of cannibals cooking some servicemen seems to be the only representation of black people in ODT!, and it’s not a very good one. I’m not sure what it says about the time, about race or about my father, but it hasn’t aged well. When asked, my father said it was a common depiction of cannibals in popular media at the time. I remember such depictions from TV shows of my youth like Gilligan’s Island.
I’m not sure whether my father drew this cartoon before or after he met his barracks-mate Lincoln or if that would have made a difference, but I think it’s quite possible he just didn’t know any people of color before he left Chicago for the Air Force. Given the insular nature of most ethnic communities in the Chicago area at the time, it’s quite possible he didn’t. If I’m right, the only depictions he would have known would have been from movies and other popular culture at the time.
On a related note, I asked my father if he ever experienced anti-semitism in the Air Force, and his response said more about white-on-black racism than racism. He was sitting in the mess hall with a friend when a black German officer walked in with his white wife. When they left, his friend said, “I don’t know what people have against you Jews. At least you’re white.” My father got up from the table and told the guy not to speak with him again.
